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They simply described it as “Mr Brightside Remix” by “The Killers”. I’ve just searched the Internet, and iTunes, but I can’t seem to find the exact remix that I was looking for. I even looked on the MTV2 website for a playlist, but they don’t have one listed.

Like most popular songs, there are several remixes around, and it sounded quite similar to “Jacques Lu Cont’s Thin White Duke remix*”, but that’s not quite it.

The mix I heard was a slower version of the song, but it wasn’t just that – problem is, I can’t quite put my finger on it! Does anyone have any ideas?

* Incidentally, I’m liking the Lu Cont remix, and have bought it from iTunes.

Over the last year and a half that I have been fully employed, there are a couple of things that have begun to slightly annoy me (when using a computer), and being a developer, I can see the solution to a lot of these problems….

Problem OneCut, Copy, Paste in Microsoft Excel. This sucks! If you think about it, it actually works completely differently to the rest of the operating system, and different to what you would expect it to. Essentially, if you select a cell that you would like to copy, it becomes highlighted with a dashed border. I can then freely move around the application and paste this value wherever I want (so far so good). Unfortunately, if you then decide to type something, the highlight is lost (not a problem), and the data is no longer in the clipboard for you to paste. If you then need to paste that value again somewhere, you can’t do it! You need to go back and copy the data again!

Problem TwoSlack space Overwrite. Now this is an idea. Imagine this: You have a line of fixed width text. In that text, you have left spaces so that the line format matches the line above (there are common words in both lines). Now imagine you want to change an uncommon word in the middle of that line, by adding a few characters into the beginning of that word. If you use normal “insert” typing mode, the rest of the line would move to the right for every character inserted, and you would need to delete any slack characters until the words were aligned again. If you use “Overwrite” typing mode, you would need to overwrite the entire word.

My suggestion would be to have a third mode: “Slack space Overwrite”. This means that from the cursor position, it will insert the character at that position (without overwriting), and then move along the line until a gap of two or more spaces is encountered. It will then remove one of these space characters, and move all the characters between the inserted character, and the removed character, along one space to the right. If no suitable space characters are found, then the whole line moves one character to the right, therefore increasing the line length by one character. I am fairly sure that this would be easy to implement (from an operating system point of view), and could be activated by pressing (for example) Ctrl+Insert. I know for a fact that it would make my life so much easier.

Something surprised me last night, to the point that it made me drop open my mouth, and then start laughing in amazement. This doesn’t happen very much anymore, especially when dealing with computers – even though the outcome may not be known to me, I can usually hazard a guess at the outcome, or determine an informed estimate. It’s nice to see that I’m yet to see everything this world has to offer me.

Last night I inserted a movie DVD into my MythTV media centre. I didn’t expect it work, as I had not configured anything, and I wasn’t sure whether I needed DeCSS, it runs Linux which isn’t supposed to support movie DVDs, etc, etc.

So, I went to the “Optical Discs” menu, selected “Play DVD”. It worked. Straight away. Wonderfully. Without error. I was amazed. Seriously amazed.

So it is now that I raise my hat, and pay tribute to those people who did this. You amaze me with your dedication, generousity (let’s not forget that this is all “Free” – in both senses of the word), ingenuity and talent. Bravo.

I’m currently reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (it’s the book in the series before “The Da Vinci Code”), and I’ve just hit the beginning of chapter 56. It starts with the following line:The four unmarked Alpha Romeo 155 T-Sparks roared down Via dei Coronari like fighter jets off a runway.This annoys me. The main character, Robert Langdon, is a symbologist, and therefore there are many references to symbols and symbology from ancient history.

What Brown has failed to do though, is notice that the car is actually called the τ-Spark – the first letter is the greek symbol “Tau” (lower case). Next time you see one, have a look, it’s not a “t” but a Tau.

Incidentally, for this post, I found this site, which appears to republish the entire “Angels and Demons” book verbatim – something that I am sure is not legal!

He’s also spelt the name of the car wrong! It’s called an “Alfa Romeo” not “Alpha Romeo”!